Knald vs Material Maker

Knald is a standalone GPU-powered application for generating textures from polygon meshes and 2D sources such as photographs and heightmaps. Its Baker creates textures from high-to-low polygon meshes, while Color To Normals turns images or heightmaps into normal maps for processing in the Integrator. Documented outputs include normal, derivative, displacement or height, ambient occlusion, transmission, concavity, and convexity maps. Knald supports texture baking and physically based rendering workflows. Processing uses single- and double-precision floating point and handles 8-, 16-, and 32-bit image data. The company describes it as suitable for physically based pipelines in interactive work, visual arts, and product design. A supported OpenCL-compatible GPU is required. Listed compatibility is limited to 64-bit Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10. The 30-day demo costs nothing (30-day demo). The Freelancer License costs $100 as a one-time purchase; it covers qualifying individuals or businesses with no more than one director, officer, manager, member, or employee, and permits installation on up to two devices owned by the licensee. The Studio License costs $200 as a one-time purchase.

Material Maker is an open-source tool for authoring procedural PBR materials with node graphs and exporting them for game engines and movie assets. It supports static and dynamic PBR, raymarching, and dynamic unlit materials. The official site lists more than 200 nodes; users can create nodes by combining existing ones or describing them in GLSL. Materials can be exported for Godot, Unity, and Unreal Engine. Unreal requires extra steps: Unreal Engine 4 needs manual material setup, while Unreal Engine 5 uses a generated Python script that must be run in Unreal. The tool provides 2D and 3D previews, image and spritesheet export, and loading of custom OBJ models. An experimental procedural-brush feature can texture 3D models. A website library offers community materials, nodes, brushes, and environments. Material Maker runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows. It is free through Itch.io, with a Steam plan at $14.99 as a one-time purchase. Its code uses the MIT License and assets use Creative Commons Zero 1.0 Universal.